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A new Super PAC ad suggests how Donald Trump's history of sexist insults can be thrown back in his face — perhaps previewing how Hillary Clinton would go after Trump in a general election.
The ad, released Monday by a Republican-led anti-Trump Super PAC, features a series of women attacking Trump through a simple yet effective tactic: reading Trump's own words aloud.
Many of the video's Trump quotes — "bimbo," "blood coming out of her … wherever," "fat pig" — are familiar to close followers of the campaign, while others ("It really doesn't matter what they write, as long as you've got a young and beautiful piece of ass") give added depth to Trump's views on women.
Either way, it's not as if the producers of the video had to do a ton of archival research. All of the quotes but one — "Women: you have to treat 'em like shit" — come from either this year or last.
Here's the ad, which was produced by Our Principles PAC, an organization formed by veterans of the Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush campaigns to stop Trump:
If he becomes the nominee, Trump will have a huge problem with women voters in a general election
So far, Trump hasn't been hurt by insulting Muslims and Mexicans, who make up a small fraction of the Republican Party's primary electorate.
His sexist remarks about women, however, have already shown signs of costing him at the ballot box.
Among Republicans, Trump is consistently more popular with men than he is with women. Public Policy Polling found in late February that 51 percent of male GOP voters favored Trump, compared with just 39 percent of female Republicans. On Tuesday, Trump won by a "huge margin" among men in Michigan — about 20 points — while losing among women to Ted Cruz.
Trump's gender gap would likely grow much wider in a general election. Last week, ABC News published a poll that puts Clinton up 21 points among women over Trump in a head-to-head matchup. One analysis published in Politico suggested Trump would have to win 70 percent of white men voting in November to win — more than any Republican has won, even in landslide victories.
The Clinton campaign knows that. The New York Times recently looked at her blueprint for running against Trump in a general election, and it highlighted her plan to exploit and increase a gender gap.
"The strategy highlights a concern among Mrs. Clinton’s allies that her chance to become the first female president has not led to widespread excitement among young women," The Times said. "Mr. Trump is the perfect solution to the enthusiasm gap, many Democrats say."
Mitt Romney was badly defeated among women voters. Trump would do even worse.
In 2012, Republican nominee Mitt Romney made a fumbling statement about how he had requested "binders full of women" to help him fill positions while governor of Massachusetts.
Here's Romney:
We took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet. I went to a number of women's groups and said: "Can you help us find folks," and they brought us whole binders full of women.
Critics pounced on the remark. At the Guardian, Emma Keller wrote that "the phrase objectified and dehumanized women."
"It played right into the perception that so many women have feared about a Romney administration — that a president Romney would be sexist and set women back," Keller wrote.
Democrats launched a broader effort to connect Romney to the Republican "war on women." Liberal writers criticized Romney for his position on contraceptives and for his uneven response to the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.
Whether or not you agree with the attack, the strategy appeared to work.
Barack Obama won women voters by 12 points over Romney in what Gallup called the largest gender gap in a presidential election since 1952. Women were the majority of voters that year, outnumbering men by a 55-45 margin, according to the Center for American Progress.
In other words, Democrats successfully attacked a Republican nominee whose most controversial statement about women was intended to highlight how much he cared about including female workers in his office.
By contrast, here's one of the video's quotes from Trump about his thoughts on family life: "I like kids. I mean, I won't do anything to take care of them. I'll supply funds, and she'll take care of the kids."
Is it really any wonder that Clinton is itching to run against Trump?
